Friday, 8 February 2013

No one buys me omelets anymore

I make friends easily. I like talking. I can talk to walls.
And trees. And stones. I can talk to people of all ages. I am full of small
conversation. It does tire me sometimes when I talk for hours with people I
don’t know very well so I have to use my head to think up topics. But I do it.
And then the next few times it is not as difficult.

But I don’t have someone I talk to every day. I mean, aside
from my husband of course. And that too nowadays - I talk to him a little bit as
he has the free time. Else with all the running around, we stuck to minimal
conversations, dealing with the key things and leaving philosophical musings
aside. For years.

I think that’s what sucks about modern relationships. I
mean, if it doesn’t suck as much for you, that is wonderful. But the long
distance thing is just terrible as far as I am concerned. I should know, as we
were ‘real’ long distance for five years, living in different states.

Even when we solved that problem though, it was not like we
had oodles of time to shoot the breeze, so to say. Life has always been busy.
Consultants travel , they work long hours, academics have the flexibility but
also lot of disparate things to do through the day. Plus the child, and the
home to run. You know.

I find that I sort of drift towards long distance
friendships as well. I don’t dismiss the chance of striking up a friendship
just because the person is certain to leave. So I have a number of friends
spread all across the globe, and while we have shared some awesome months
together, we are a long distance apart now.

And even the friends I have in the city, well, I don’t
really meet them so very regularly. We have parties and social occasions
together. But there are a large number of us and I hardly manage to talk to
each of them for a few minutes at a time. And I fade fast and am usually dog tired
and partly asleep by 10pm.

I should use the telephone more, I know. But I hate it. There
are all the new cool things with video chats and so forth, I like those, but they
are a bit of pain as well. I love text conversations and I think that’s the way
I stay in touch with most of my friends. That’s my thing. I would find life
hard without it.

I miss my long distance friends a lot. Sometimes I think
about them - some memory trigger – and feel
super sad. For example, I remember how a friend of mine - now far away - surprised me once with
a still-warm cheese omelet. I was starving and I think I haven’t eaten anything
tastier than that in living memory…